The free K12 Online Conference 2007 starts this week and goes through the month. You can access a program here:
Why are we using a wiki?
Instead of preparing assignments that can seem like their only purpose is to fulfill a course requirement, I want to give you a chance to "bump up" the quality of your work by asking you to make it useful for others. This requires that you and your classmates write and edit for an outside audience. To coordinate our knowledge-building community, we'll use this wiki. This video explains how a wiki works and why wikis are good tools for collaboration:
But I am a student. Why do I have to be a "knowledge builder?"
By building knowledge for others, YOU will learn more. Research on how people learn is showing that we understand things more deeply when we explain things to others, and we often rely on others (mentors, family, friends, etc) to show us how to do new things and to provide feedback that helps us sharpen our knowledge and skills. Sharing what you think you know and processing feedback are keys to efficient learning! It is extremely hard to really understand something if you don't get feedback to make sure you're on the right track. By sharing your work on this wiki, you can show what you know, provide and process friendly feedback, and not waste time memorizing facts that you forget after the course is over.
Privacy Notice
Though this site may eventually be viewable by people outside of these classes, it will be private access during this semester. That said, you shouldn't post anything on this site (or any where else on the Internet) that you would not want your parents (or cooperating teacher) to read. You will know well in advance when the site goes public, probably at the end of the semester.'''----
Archived 11/5/07
The two classes that are currently sharing this space are very different. Students take EDC 102 before being admitted into the School of Education, and are thus mostly underclassmen. The class is an introduction to our understanding of American public schools as well as to the issues that currently influence various school policies. EDC 430 is a senior level teaching methods course focused on science teaching. Students take this course in conjunction with EDC 431 where they spend one day a week in the classrooms where they will student teach in spring.
Right now URITeacherKnowledge is a "walled garden ," whose access is limited while we start up and explore how it can be most useful to the community. Eventually, it will be made public, with this year's students' entries acting as a foundation for subsequent edits and additions.
Over the first third of the semester, the EDC 102 students developed context reports for particular schools in Rhode Island. Each context report describes a particular school as well as the school's district and community. These reports are intended to inform either teachers (or student teachers) preparing for new assignments or parents considering a placement for their child. The schools they are reporting on are denoted on the map below. Each school's context report can be accessed by clicking on a school's location on the map and following the link. Though the reports themselves are currently locked, feel fr
----Right now in EDC 430/1, students are helping out in the classrooms where they will do their student teaching and working in class to plan an inquiry-rich instructional unit. We talked in class last night about some of their unit ideas, including units that explored the solar system and earthquakes. We saw firsthand how easy it was to find motivating videos of phenomena. Two examples of this are shown below:
Inner Solar System Animation
Earthquake Map
Though its easy to find these resources on the web, they raise other questions: How to best make them available for students? What tasks, especially tasks that help develop students higher-order thinking skills, can we ask students to do with these representations? Other questions?
The free K12 Online Conference 2007 starts this week and goes through the month. You can access a program here:
Why are we using a wiki?
Instead of preparing assignments that can seem like their only purpose is to fulfill a course requirement, I want to give you a chance to "bump up" the quality of your work by asking you to make it useful for others. This requires that you and your classmates write and edit for an outside audience. To coordinate our knowledge-building community, we'll use this wiki. This video explains how a wiki works and why wikis are good tools for collaboration:
By building knowledge for others, YOU will learn more. Research on how people learn is showing that we understand things more deeply when we explain things to others, and we often rely on others (mentors, family, friends, etc) to show us how to do new things and to provide feedback that helps us sharpen our knowledge and skills. Sharing what you think you know and processing feedback are keys to efficient learning! It is extremely hard to really understand something if you don't get feedback to make sure you're on the right track. By sharing your work on this wiki, you can show what you know, provide and process friendly feedback, and not waste time memorizing facts that you forget after the course is over.
Privacy Notice
Though this site may eventually be viewable by people outside of these classes, it will be private access during this semester. That said, you shouldn't post anything on this site (or any where else on the Internet) that you would not want your parents (or cooperating teacher) to read. You will know well in advance when the site goes public, probably at the end of the semester.'''----Archived 11/5/07
The two classes that are currently sharing this space are very different. Students take EDC 102 before being admitted into the School of Education, and are thus mostly underclassmen. The class is an introduction to our understanding of American public schools as well as to the issues that currently influence various school policies. EDC 430 is a senior level teaching methods course focused on science teaching. Students take this course in conjunction with EDC 431 where they spend one day a week in the classrooms where they will student teach in spring.
Right now URITeacherKnowledge is a "walled garden ," whose access is limited while we start up and explore how it can be most useful to the community. Eventually, it will be made public, with this year's students' entries acting as a foundation for subsequent edits and additions.
Over the first third of the semester, the EDC 102 students developed context reports for particular schools in Rhode Island. Each context report describes a particular school as well as the school's district and community. These reports are intended to inform either teachers (or student teachers) preparing for new assignments or parents considering a placement for their child. The schools they are reporting on are denoted on the map below. Each school's context report can be accessed by clicking on a school's location on the map and following the link. Though the reports themselves are currently locked, feel fr
----Right now in EDC 430/1, students are helping out in the classrooms where they will do their student teaching and working in class to plan an inquiry-rich instructional unit. We talked in class last night about some of their unit ideas, including units that explored the solar system and earthquakes. We saw firsthand how easy it was to find motivating videos of phenomena. Two examples of this are shown below: